How to study philosophy

Enough of why?! Since I’ve now made the decision to embark more wholeheartedly on this journey of philosophical inquiry, it’s the how of studying philosophy that becomes important. I’m aware that previously my reading has remained as just that, reading. This no longer cuts the mustard, I need some strategies for getting more out of the time I invest in reading philosophical texts. Here are some ideas.

Philosophy starts with radical wonderment about the Being of the universe; it starts with the problems of philosophy; it starts with the self. Whichever base you take as your launching point, you will eventually cover all three.

Philosophy, I have discovered, is all about dialogue, the dialogue that seeks to build a bridge between one subjectivity, one ‘I exist’ and another.

How does one acquire the skills of the philosopher? If you are a distance learning student, how do you get to practice and improve your skills? As a Pathways mentor this is a question I take seriously.

‘It’s not enough to read,’ I tell my students, ‘you have to write, you have to go through the struggle of attempting to express your thoughts and then the further struggle of seeing what you have written objectively, so that you can criticise it. You have to learn to argue with yourself.’

The most important intellectual attribute of a philosopher is not the ability to follow long chains of argument (that’s something you learn, the same way you can learn to improve your memory), but the capacity for judgement: the judgement that sees that a particular line is not worth pursuing; that an argument is unsound even though it’s premisses and logic are impeccable; that knows which questions are worth asking; that knows when to wield the analytical knife and when to leave well enough alone. (Pirsig is good on this last point.)

Chart the contrasts amongst positions by cataloging differences among arguments’ premises and conclusions.

Put positions in conversation with each other.

When studying a particular argument, summarize the argument, come up with an objection that might be raised against the argument, and suggest a way that the argument’s author might respond to that objection.